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For the past month I have been lucky to be a part of the TELUS program dubbed “10 Best of BlackBerry Q10” with the Twitter hashtag #10BestOfBBQ10. The folks at TELUS were kind enough to send me a brand new TELUS BlackBerry Q10 along with an activated TELUS line and let me play with it so I could review it and let you, my loyal readers, and the internet at large know what I think of it. Before I go on, I want to be clear about a few things: 1. I really was excited to play with this device and wanted to love it and make it my primary phone from the moment I got the email from TELUS.

2. I don’t really care about apps beyond my core of email, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and a web browser. Having Foursquare and some other apps is nice and all but it isn’t an absolute necessity and I would gladly give them up for a physical keyboard on a device which functioned superbly.

3. I love Swype for Android because of the ease of typing but I choose it over all other keyboard options available for Android because of its editing capabilities. The easy way I can use keyboard shortcuts to cut, copy, and paste reminds me of my PC and my BlackBerry keyboard which both have shortcuts for those functions. On any BlackBerry before the Z10 and the Q10 (referred to as a “Legacy BlackBerry”) this was accomplished by a few different shortcuts which BlackBerry helpfully lists here. On a PC it’s the old reliable CTRL-X, CTRL-C, & CTRL-V. That, coupled with the trackpad-replacing “Edit Keyboard Layer (PIC)” which Swype has means it is my go to and you’ll be hard pressed to convince me to switch to another keyboard.

The final straws for me with my 9900 was when I got the black clock of waiting when the phone had freshly booted and I was writing an email. The device slowing down during such a mundane task was too much coupled with the camera being so horrible I couldn’t take a picture of an article in the newspaper because it’s fixed focus lens couldn’t handle close up shots. When those 2 things happened I gave up, threw in the towel, called it quits, and broke up with BlackBerry.

For all those who are too lazy to read a long review here it is in three sentences: The TELUS HSPA/LTE network in Toronto is great providing very good coverage and speeds. All in all, the BlackBerry Q10 Read more…